X -Where Twitter goes to die.

[Suranis]

I wouldn't describe myself as a tech bro anymore. But for me it was pretty much that Apple should have won the Desktop wars of the 80s and 90s. At the time they simply had a better product. Microsoft won with shit that is pretty unethical by my standard, so I've been holding my nose using their operating system ever since.

Looking back, another reason that Microsoft won was Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs. He had gifts, but he should have done the Richard Branson thing of letting someone else run the company while he stuck to what he was good at.

[neonzx]

Well, I am relieved now. Caitlyn Jenner has weighed in. Nothing to see here, Ye is just a great dude.

"I've known him my whole life" "Well, 10 years."

[raison de arizona]

“He’s a really nice guy, I mean, for a Nazi.”

[Jim]

Looking back, another reason that Microsoft won was Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs. He had gifts, but he should have done the Richard Branson thing of letting someone else run the company while he stuck to what he was good at.

I would say the reason Microsoft won was the IBM didn't want to maintain the DOS system and practically gave it away to Gates along with an agreement to install their OS on all IBM micros...at that time the leading sellers of micros.

[neeneko]

You started off well -- but then went off into defending what we tech bros consider the Apple cult... And it did become a cult worship following -- all the same hallmarks.

Meh, computing is mostly a collection of cults calling each other cults. There is a good reason we describe so many issues as 'religious wars'. I would not even call the mac people all that fanatical.. I mean,.. have you ever MET an Amiga user?

[MN-Skeptic]

Having worked in corporate IT, Windows won because that's where the programs were - Multimate, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Office, plus all the specialized departmental programs I played a part in evaluating and installing. IRMA boards in the PCs so that users could use the IBM mainframe.

I've always been a Windows user because of my background. As a former accountant, I track a lot of things through spreadsheet. Shoot... my first spreadsheet was Visicalc on an Apple. But then IBM-PCs came along with Lotus 1-2-3, and our company went PCs. (Except Engineering. They were Unix, but supported themselves.) I also use Quicken and TurboTax. And any web browser is a web browser, no matter the operating system.

I resisted Apple devices until I had to replace a Palm Pilot and the only acceptable alternative was an iPod Touch. Now all my handheld devices are Apple because in that area of technology they rule. But for my laptop requirements, Windows rules.

Edited to add - As a former accountant, I HAVE to have a full size numeric keypad on my laptop. Apple does not make such a laptop. Why would ANY accountant buy a laptop without a numeric keypad??

[qbawl]

Way

Off Topic

Back in the '90s Apple and IBM did some collaboration that manifested as 'Talegent, Pink, and some other more obscure code-named projects. This lead to speculation about a possible merger. The question of the day was what to call the merged entity? answer 'IBM'!

Looking at todays close of market figures Apple's market cap is almost 18 times that of IBM and about 1.25 that of Microsoft. So I find it odd to say that Microsoft won.

After all they are fundamentally different industries. Apple is / was a hardware company while Microsoft is / was a software house. Today though both companies derive a large portion of their revenue from 'Services'.

Also too, one should not ever underestimate the importance of Steve Jobs to Apples success. There are many stories about his acerbic, some have said toxic management style some true some less than true, but IMHO if he had not returned when he did Apple would have become a small division of some other company at best or perhaps just ceased to exist.

[raison de arizona]

Musk let the virulently white supremacist leader of Daily Stormer back on Twitter today. He got kicked off something like ten years ago. Winning!

[Danraft]

Yeah, there’s this odd thing with the Musk free speech absolutists that believe the reason Twitter needed Musk to save it was that there was a disparate ratio of Right wing vs Democratic (Liberal Woke Leftists) peeps that were suspended or disciplined. They feel the numbers should be equal.

They don’t seem to get that there just weren’t as many peeps on the Left spouting hate or disinformation.

This is part of what Trump tried to do with the weaponizing of the AG— make the numbers of indictments of the leftists equal the number of “conservatives.” It just wasn’t possible. Every time there was a forced investigation it was a nothing burger.

So, IMO, Musk is trying to get some street-cred back with the absolutist after slapping Ye’s wrist for the swastika (which Elon would not have done if the EU didn’t have a hard bright line on that topic).

[busterbunker]

So the world's largest attention whore bought the world's largest attention whorehouse. Whatever.

[Danraft]

Well, I argue the algorithms of a platform create the environment that define how many interact. For instance, one way to become seen on Twitter is have a tweet receive many comments (bonus if it is “shock jock” material that is very offensive to one group and gets shared and comments and likes from many groups (for disparate reasons).

That said, Twitter did become a platform wherein one can get the most up to date instant news from active news events. And, one would get that info from a Verified user or group that, because it is a “verified” account, has greater reliability.

In some circles, like archeology, molecular genetics, etc, the person shares their papers and views and there is informed discussions.

We, here at Fogbow, see Legal Twitter do this service.

Musk destroyed this aspect of Twitter by leveling the “Verified” status of an account to anyone that will pay $8.

There is real loss, for me at least.

That said, the world keeps spinning and other virtual spaces will likely take over these important functions.

[sugar magnolia]

And yet.....
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elo ... tifascist/

[Danraft]

Thank you, Sugar!!!
To All (since we all care about voices against fascism, etc)— please take the time to read. It’s 5 minutes well spent.
I shared it on Twitter and other platforms because it is important.

Yes, Elon is showing who he is. The fact that some global oligarch can have such an impact (particularly one who has made his fortune by not following social norms and does not seem to be anything more than another narcissistic sociopath) is actually the most troubling aspect of this to me.

Elon has fallen down the rabbit hole ( perhaps even digging new tunnels with his Tunnel Tech)…. Ooph…

I truly do not get his end game— assuming he has one.
I have said before that Tesla is built on battery tech (because his profit motive of Carbon Credits is vanishing as other EV manufacturers will claim those credits) and that, by pure luck, China has more landmass that has had asteroids hit it ( that is where most of these precious metals/minerals come from on planet Earth) and is rich in the raw materials needed to build batteries. Not to mention that labor is so much cheaper in the same geographical regions…

That Elon could be doing the bidding of China. Or, at least, when push comes to shove, Elon will cave to demands of various authoritarian regimes in the desire to further his business.

But, it is now clear that Elon is indeed everything that we, as human evolution has created our circuitry, a very dangerous human being.

He is narcissistic, Impulsive, Tribal, self-aggrandizing, etc. Somehow, humans are wired to follow such human filth.

And yet.....
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elo ... tifascist/

[Kriselda Gray]

Looking back, another reason that Microsoft won was Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs. He had gifts, but he should have done the Richard Branson thing of letting someone else run the company while he stuck to what he was good at.

I would say the reason Microsoft won was the IBM didn't want to maintain the DOS system and practically gave it away to Gates along with an agreement to install their OS on all IBM micros...at that time the leading sellers of micros.

That, plus it was easy to get IBM parts in order to custom configure a computer to your needs, and the equipment was considerably cheaper than Apple. And because IBM became so much ore widely used, content providers were more willing to make software and peripherals for them.

And the machine that really should have won was the Amiga. That was my first computer and it was really ahead of the others. It had multitasking out of the gate, a pwhile before IBM or Apple did. You could do more advanced graphics, including ray-tracing for 3D effects on its bottom-end machine (the 500), and higher-end units (the 1000 and 3000) were amazing for video editing and effects. They, like Apple, kept all their stuff proprietary which discouraged companies from supporting the platform, and their marketing department t just sucked. Several other Amiga-loving friends and I had a ru ING joke of how to take over the arketing department and ru it outselves... man, I loved that machine!

[busterbunker]

Somehow, humans are wired to follow such human filth.

Well, some humans, with the caveat that 99% of everything is shit. I like most of the folks on this place.

To tie in the computer talk, from a creative perspective, you just used whatever tools you could get your hands on. Les Paul or Strat, Amiga, Atari or Mac, I handled all that shit. But it don't matter. It's about your product. In that regard, while Twitter may have had its moments, I would never ever incorporate it into my means of production.

[Gregg]

In 9th grade our school computer club bought an Altair 8800 and spent the year building it. The next year we got a TRS-80 and I bought one of those myself with pizza money. I think I paid something like $350 dollars in 1979 for a 5 1/4 disc drive and as much for 8k of memory instead of the 4k it came with,

It was arguably better than banging rocks together. When I got frustrated I remembered a Douglas Adams quote about it being a box of sand that we have taught to count. Who knew it would lead to the demise of civilization within 50 years.

[Suranis]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ye-raelian-symbol

The tweet that got Ye suspended for "incitement of violence" actually contained a symbol associated with the UFO-focused religion known as the International Raëlian Movement.
Rating:
True

Context

Ye did post the symbol of a UFO-based religious movement containing both a swastika and a star of David, but he did so without any additional context, just hours after praising Adolf Hitler.

---

On Dec. 1, 2022, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, had his Twitter account suspended for what Twitter CEO Elon Musk described as a violation of Twitter's policies against incitement of violence. The offending tweet included a symbol of the Star of David with a hooked-cross similar to the Nazi hakenkreuz intertwined within.

Some online have attempted to brush off allegations that Ye's tweet was necessarily anti-Semitic because this symbol matches one used by followers of the International Raëlian Movement. As described by the Religion Media Centre:

Factually speaking, one of the symbols used in this movement is the same symbol Ye tweeted. It is a trademarked symbol currently owned by the United States Raelian Movement Corporation:

...

For that reason the claim is true: The symbol tweeted by Ye is associated with the UFO-focused religion known as the International Raëlian Movement. It is unclear, however, what knowledge, if any, Ye has of the Raëlian movement or its symbology. The context in which this apparent mix of Nazi and Jewish symbols was shared, however, is that it directly followed several statements in which Ye praised Hitler. 

[Ben-Prime]

Off Topic

Looking back, another reason that Microsoft won was Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs. He had gifts, but he should have done the Richard Branson thing of letting someone else run the company while he stuck to what he was good at.

I would say the reason Microsoft won was the IBM didn't want to maintain the DOS system and practically gave it away to Gates along with an agreement to install their OS on all IBM micros...at that time the leading sellers of micros.

That, plus it was easy to get IBM parts in order to custom configure a computer to your needs, and the equipment was considerably cheaper than Apple. And because IBM became so much ore widely used, content providers were more willing to make software and peripherals for them.

And the machine that really should have won was the Amiga. That was my first computer and it was really ahead of the others. It had multitasking out of the gate, a pwhile before IBM or Apple did. You could do more advanced graphics, including ray-tracing for 3D effects on its bottom-end machine (the 500), and higher-end units (the 1000 and 3000) were amazing for video editing and effects. They, like Apple, kept all their stuff proprietary which discouraged companies from supporting the platform, and their marketing department t just sucked. Several other Amiga-loving friends and I had a ru ING joke of how to take over the arketing department and ru it outselves... man, I loved that machine!

Amiga's incompetence in that sole regard outlasted their own death. The IP was sold -- sloppily from what I'm told -- to a South Florida fellow who was likewise so bad at planning that he would die intestate while trying to launch a new Amiga line. It all went to chaos. His planned office/storefront was down the block from my old office from my last pre-Foreign Service job and my programmer and I would drive past it regularly on our way to grab lunch at our favorite Cuban or Indian joints (in the same plaza) and we'd sigh.

[RTH10260]

Twitter moderators turn to automation amid a reported surge in hate speech
New head of trust and safety Ella Irwin says Elon Musk is urging Twitter ‘to take more risks’ in the wake of mass layoffs

Reuters
Sat 3 Dec 2022 03.09 GMT

Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content according to the company’s new head of trust and safety, amid a reported surge in hate speech on the social media platform.

Ella Irwin has told the Reuters news agency that Musk, who acquired the company in October, was focused on using automation more, arguing that Twitter had in the past erred on the side of using time and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content.

“He’s encouraged the team to take more risks, move fast, get the platform safe,” she said.

On child safety Irwin said Twitter had shifted toward automatically taking down tweets reported by trusted figures with a track record of accurately flagging harmful posts.

Twitter is also more aggressively restricting abuse-prone hashtags and search results in areas including child exploitation, regardless of potential impacts on “benign uses” of those terms, she said.

“The biggest thing that’s changed is the team is fully empowered to move fast and be as aggressive as possible,” Irwin said.

Her comments come as researchers reported a surge in hate speech on the social media service, after Musk announced an amnesty for accounts suspended under the company’s previous leadership that had not broken the law or engaged in “egregious spam”.



https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ate-speech

[Kriselda Gray]

Off Topic

Amiga's incompetence in that sole regard outlasted their own death. The IP was sold -- sloppily from what I'm told -- to a South Florida fellow who was likewise so bad at planning that he would die intestate while trying to launch a new Amiga line. It all went to chaos. His planned office/storefront was down the block from my old office from my last pre-Foreign Service job and my programmer and I would drive past it regularly on our way to grab lunch at our favorite Cuban or Indian joints (in the same plaza) and we'd sigh

Wow, that is really sad. Amiga deserved so much better...

[Foggy]

So the world's largest attention whore bought the world's largest attention whorehouse. Whatever.

I could pick holes in that ... but I like it.

[Foggy]

Off Topic

I think Microsoft won because of price, plain and simple. In 1993 I wanted a computer. I could get one for $500, an IBM clone with Windows 3.1, or I could get an Apple computer for $2,000. It was a better computer, but I couldn't afford it. So I, and many other Earthlings, bought $500 computers.

And y'all know there was a huge lawsuit, yesno? Apple tried to sue its way to total permanent monopoly.

[neonzx]

Off Topic

I think Microsoft won because of price, plain and simple. In 1993 I wanted a computer. I could get one for $500, an IBM clone with Windows 3.1, or I could get an Apple computer for $2,000. It was a better computer, but I couldn't afford it. So I, and many other Earthlings, bought $500 computers.

And y'all know there was a huge lawsuit, yesno? Apple tried to sue its way to total permanent monopoly.

Off Topic

You are speaking of the mouse pointer lawsuit over XOR technicology? I give the cult credit for trying to hoodwink the general public, but the tech bros knew better. You can't patent XOR.

And Air "Fryers" are a trademark/patent case that never happened -- just saying --

.

[Foggy]

You are speaking of the mouse pointer lawsuit over XOR technicology?

No, this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_C ... osoft_Corp.

Apple wanted to be the only computer that had a GUI.

[pipistrelle]